Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (21 page)

decent job and started a family, but instead I was sitting here, insane with misery, praying not to be given the death penalty.

It was so difficult saying goodbye and when he left my heart split once again. How I wished I could have gone home with him. My head was bursting into a thousand pieces.

People around me often received news that a member of their family or a close friend had died and I lived in constant fear that someday I would receive a similar letter. Girls would break down, inconsolable, as the news filtered through. Perhaps they hadn’t

seen their family member for a year, maybe three, sometimes five or it might even be
10
years.The guilt they felt was unimaginable. Some of them cried publicly, others screeched. Many more just walked to a corner of the cell and stared blankly at the wall. I

resigned myself to the possibility that my grandfather would not last my sentence. I tried not to think that it could be someone else. Letters telling me of bad news were always written in the past tense. Situations that had already happened and were now resolved were OK to pass on, as long as there had been some kind of posi- tive result at the end. ‘Your dad was ill and had to be taken into hospital, but he is fine now.’ Or, ‘Pa-Pa was terribly sick over Christmas and we didn’t think he would pull through, but he’s back at home now and eating like a horse.’ I wondered about the

things they were keeping from me.

I dreamed of home so often that sometimes I couldn’t distin- guish between the dream and the reality.Was I dreaming I was a prisoner? Or, was I dreaming that I was at home? It was madden- ing trying to figure out what dream exactly was true. Everything became a blur and, at times, I really did question my sanity.

The dreams grew more absurd. I imagined the judge would throw the case out of court simply because I asked him to, or that the police wouldn’t bother to charge us or that somehow I would be granted bail and be able to find the money to pay for it.

There was just a wall between freedom and myself. Surely it wouldn’t be so difficult for it to disappear? I woke every morning,

exhausted from being a fugitive during the night. Even in the daytime I obsessed over it. One woman, who I had got to know fairly well, told me that she would do everything to help me if I found a way. But she would not come with me. Why? I asked her. She would be leaving through the gate the legal way very soon, she replied. She was serving a
50
-year sentence and had just completed five.

As hard as it was being in LardYao, I remember sitting in the room one night looking at all the Asian faces and realising that, since my arrest, no other British woman had been as stupid as I had been in Bangkok.

Every time I went to court there was a pack of journalists and reporters following my every move and I knew that my case was being covered by most of the national newspapers and television stations in the UK. I sat there wondering whether my case had prevented any other potential smugglers from taking the chances that I had taken. All of a sudden the fog lifted and I didn’t mind being there quite so much.

In April of
1994
the fog descended again. Patricia Hussain was

arrested at Bangkok airport in possession of
7
kilos of heroin that she was trying to take out of Thailand.Any day now she would be arriving in LardYao.

‘Fucking hell,’ she said, when I met her the morning after she arrived.‘It’s you. I saw you on the telly before I left to do this trip and I said to my mate,“Shit, Dolly, if I do this trip I could end up in the same place as that girl on the telly.” Dolly told me not to do it, but I reckoned I’d be OK. Guess I reckoned wrong, eh?’

Patricia was from Manchester, a former prostitute and mother of two. She was short, dumpy and wild-looking, with a lop-sided face from having been bashed around with several baseball bats. She giggled a hysterical laugh.We became friends and, for a few months, she was a breath of fresh British air with stories of life at home. Her tales though were so different from my own memories

of England and her life in Manchester made me quite glad to be in Thailand. She settled down to prison life and adapted to suit herself; we came from different worlds and had little in common with each other so it was inevitable that we wouldn’t remain friends for long.

Some time later Patricia received a death sentence that was converted immediately to life imprisonment. I asked one of my Thai friends in the prison to write her a letter of appeal, and a year after getting the first sentence the court reduced it to
35
years and then to
25
years in a general amnesty. In July
1996
, Patricia was flown to the United States to testify in a trial involving the smug-

gling of cocaine from Latin America, and she left Bangkok accompanied by US marshals. She would later go to Britain to testify in a drugs trial. Her appeal to the king for clemency was heard even though she was arrested more than a year after me, and

it resulted in her sentence being reduced to
10
years.

In many ways, the prison was a showpiece. Everything that could be reasonably said to be in good condition was simply for the benefit of both the easy working of the prison machine and the guards who worked there. Nothing was meant to make life easier for the women.There is a Thai expression – ‘Sprinkle the surface with coriander’ – that basically means ‘Create an impression that the whole is as pretty as the surface.’Thai food is usually presented with a sprinkling of coriander and even the blandest food can look appealing after the finishing touches are added.

Pretty fences hide slums in the city, while bushes and hedges were planted in LardYao to hide the conditions in which prison- ers lived. The surface of Lard Yao was constantly sprinkled, metaphorically, with coriander. It was a reminder of the paradise that lay outside. Anyone seeing Lard Yao for the first time would think it was perfectly fine.

Some factory worker prisoners worked six days a week making plastic flowers, umbrellas or baskets from telephone directories,

while others sat all day at sewing machines making army and school uniforms. Most of the women who made the school uni- forms had been in prison for so long that they had forgotten what a child dressed for school actually looks like.These women each received around £
9
every six months for their work.They sat in neat rows that created an impression of order. If the prison had a contract with a company, the workers would often work their usual eight-hour day and then all night – packing or sewing – to ensure the contract was completed on time.Threats would follow anyone not volunteering to work overtime.

Much of the work was carried out for huge multinational com- panies, including a famous children’s film company, a well-known photographic company and a firm, in London, which sold very expensive bags. Women made ski-suits and baby clothes for the European market, packed playing cards and glued together chil- dren’s toys with flammable solvents.

Other women worked in one of the five kitchens, or the laundry, or organised the general running of the prison. One woman was the electrician and, for a price, fixed broken fans in the rooms. Groups of girls worked on the gardens, cleaned out the water tanks and dredged the sewers every day.

The bakery ovens were turned on at
3
o’clock in the morning, with the early shift girls, and were never switched off before
10
o’clock at night.Work began at
4
.
00
am and went on until
8
.
00
pm, making pastries and bread that were sold in a shop outside the prison gate. The officers could order things for themselves and at NewYear the bakery girls worked
24
hours a day getting all the orders together and making sure the shop outside didn’t run out of anything.

Those who worked there did so every day for
52
weeks per

year. Like the women in the sewing factory, we were paid roughly

£
9
every six months although one year we received nothing because the officer who ran the bakery told us that ‘All the profits have gone into your stomachs, so you’ll get nothing’.

Although very little of the baking was for the inmates, there were ways of getting hold of some of it. The ‘extras’ – what we could steal – always came in useful. A fresh loaf of white bread, straight out of the oven, could ensure a lasting friendship in Lard Yao, especially if you could steal a little butter to go with it.The taste of European-style food was a wonderful way to get away from the endless diet of rice and boiled fish. But after a while even the food in the bakery became boring and dull.

The prison bakery was always being shown off to anyone visit- ing the prison in an official capacity: guards from other prisons, Department of Corrections officers and the occasional foreign embassy staff. Most of the women would be hurried out the back of the bakery and warned to hide behind the fence until the visit passed.Those who stayed behind were ordered not to say anything that would undermine either the prison, the prison staff or the fate of the prisoners themselves.

The bakery, with its pungent aroma, its smiling officer and its superficial surroundings, made Lard Yao appear almost perfect. It was supposed to be a reflection of how the rest of the prison func- tioned, a kind of cook-it-yourself metaphor of rehabilitation. If the prisoners had a bakery, then surely life in the prisons could not have been that bad? Sprinkle the surface with…

The rodent population of the kitchens and the bakery ensured that Lard Yao was altogether less than perfect. Every night they would appear and eat whatever had not been locked away. The tell-tale signs could be seen every morning in all the mixing machines and across all the counters. They would chew through bags of sugar and vegetables and trap themselves in pipes.

I began living in the bakery; we all did. And we stored our meagre possessions – some prison clothing, a few toiletries, a little food, some letters – amongst the shelves and bags of flour, or between utensils and under or in anything.We kept our stuff well hidden from the officer in the bakery, one of the most foul-

mouthed, bad-tempered and miserable women in Lard Yao. We christened her ‘Old Mother Penis’.

She was properly known as Mare – the polite name for an older woman – Dtick. Mother Dick. If ever Old Mother Penis saw so much as a dirty rim of a washbowl or a bar of soap lying idle, she screamed obscenities at the top of her voice, ripping the kitchen to pieces, pulling out all our stuff and throwing it outside.

‘Prostitutes!’ she screamed. ‘Buffaloes!’ ‘Wankers!’ And ‘Slags!’ She repeated this, over and over, until she was red-faced and exhausted.

Old Mother Penis was not a woman to be messed with. Once, she stood Pee Pom out in the sun for a whole day for warming a bowl of vegetables in the oven for a friend. Another day she beat poor Deng because she had forgotten to put self-raising flour in

the bread mix so it all had to be thrown away. Deng had worked in the bakery for nearly
10
years but Old Mother Penis sacked her for not making the bread properly that day, which meant that Deng went almost a year without receiving any money from the prison.

We washed at the back of the bakery, always being careful not to get caught by any of the guards or prison trustees. The general shower area where everyone was supposed to wash was mayhem and being able to wash anywhere but there, even crouched down behind the tank, was a blessing.

One morning, however, while in the main shower, after most other people had finished, one of the Nigerians hovered in front of me, grunting that I should get out and let her into my shower. I pointed to the empty one next to mine but she knocked me over just to get into the shower I was in.

‘Do you want to fight about this?’ ‘Yeah,’ she replied.

I was furious.What the hell did she think she was doing? I flew into a rage and began pounding against her face. Bang, bang, thud.
Fuck you!

She began hitting me back. She was huge and I honestly

thought she would slaughter me, but after a few punches she lowered her head and her punches landed in mid air. I was still pumped with fury and possessed of an unfamiliar strength. Even with her head down, I managed to find her nose with my punches. I wanted to see blood,
her
blood.

I never realised that I was able to fight or even that I would want to, but that morning I fought her as though I had been born to box. God, I wanted to kill her. I punched her again. And then it was over.

After this incident I developed a reputation as a fighter, which had the curious habit of keeping me out of trouble. Only on three other occasions did I have to use my fists in Lard Yao. Sometimes there is just no other way to solve a dispute in prison.

For most of us who worked in the bakery there was never any compelling reason to go anywhere else. It was like a club without secrets.We became part of the bakery and, with the flour and the fumes, the bakery became part of us.The time and the inclination to change our routine were rarely available and, if they were, we were far too busy with officers’ orders and keeping the shop stocked to do anything else.

The bakery had a black market of its own and girls would keep food for their friends in the fridge, warm food in the ovens and supplement diets with sugar, butter, breads and pastries.The black market also did a roaring trade in ‘hooch’ and one of the things that visitors were never allowed to bring into Lard Yao was

pineapple. Mashed up, loaded with sugar and left out in the sun, pineapple turns into pure alcohol within
12
hours. Prisoners would brew ‘hooch’ with other fruits but pineapple was the best thing to use if you really wanted a decent drink.

In the bakery we would stand for hours peeling fresh pineap- ples, then smash them with lumps of wood, before squeezing out the juice.We mixed the flesh with sugar and cooked the mix for hours to make a sweet, thick filling for pastries. The bakery